Coords

Nov 11, 2014

After months of learning as much as I could find about Mac development, I have finally released my first Mac app, Coords. I had this idea over four years ago when one of the iOS apps I was working on required me to work a lot with map related data. While there were many online tools for converting longitude and longitude to decimal degrees and allowed me to easily find locations, I never felt that these tools were complete enough for everyday use. Initially I wrote an iPad app that allowed me to easily add pins to a map, view their coordinates, and easily save pins for later viewing. While the app worked for me, it was nowhere near a shipping app and eventually I shelved the app. As with most of my shelved ideas, I always kept it in the back of my mind in hope to return to it in the future.

It wasn’t until June of this year that I started to rewrite the app with the goal of shipping it by the end of the year. The biggest change I wanted to make was changing the app from an iOS app to a Mac app. Coords was the perfect opportunity to learn Mac development since I already knew how the app should work, due to my four year old prototype, and I had an understanding of all the technologies that the app would require. Over the next few months I learned some basic Mac development, got the app working, and then spent the rest of the time rewriting and improving the codebase as I learned new things about Mac development.

I’m extremely happy with the app’s initial release and everything I’ve learned along the way. I’m already working on the next version, and can’t wait to create more Mac apps in the future. I also plan on collecting all the Mac development resources I used to create this app in a future post since specific Mac development, especially AppKit, are hard to find. You can download Coords here.